"If You Split a Second" at Pegasus Players ★★

Dylan McGorty and Stephanie Chavara as Mick and Jane in "If You Split a Second."

By Kerry Reid, Special to the Tribune

Many years ago at a public program in San Francisco, science-fiction legend Harlan Ellison offered his answer to the timeless question of "Why do humans do such horrible things?" Ellison's analysis? "Because it seemed like a good idea at the time."

That's about as good a reason as playwright Dana Lynn Formby provides for Mick, a man whose impulsive decision to attack and kill his sister's abusive partner forms the defining incident in "If You Split a Second," now in a shaggy world premiere at Pegasus Players under Ilesa Duncan's direction.

Stuffed with rambling meditations on volcanoes, atom bombs, pirate ships and clocks, Formby's ambitious but shapeless play is an awkward hybrid of cautionary, gritty domestic drama and strained cosmic metaphors for the cataclysms unleashed when pressure and time collide. Mick goes to jail, leaving his wife, Jane, to fend for herself and their two kids — at least until Mick's attorney brother, Patrick, takes over as husband and father. At one point, Mick suggests that Patrick's efforts to defend him in court were deliberately half-hearted in order to win access to Jane. That scenario would make for a fascinating subplot had Formby decided to use it as more than an aside.

All the roles in this two-act play are handled by Dylan McGorty and Stephanie Chavara, but since much of the time the characters are either telling the audience about what has already happened in the past or ruminating on obvious symbolic tropes, it's hard to get a solid three-dimensional handle on who these people are and how they are changed as the years go by. Formby succeeds at making the point that doing bad things without thinking about others has cascading consequences, but that's hardly revelatory.

The characters also include Mick and Jane's goth daughter, Geneva; John, an Air Force pilot who picks up the teenage Geneva with ugly consequences; and Amber, Mick's sister left widowed by her brother's sudden violence. (We never learn if Mick had tried to protect Amber before or if Amber had tried to get away from her abuser — details that would help provide a more meaningful context for Mick's actions other than "I just snapped.")

Duncan's staging is overly dependent on freeze-frame tableaus where one character remains motionless while another addresses the audience. McGorty and Chavara both show some flashes of decent acting chops here, but the static and binary nature of the script doesn't give them a lot of room to delve deeper into the lives of the characters. Since Mick is the blue-collar con with the hair-trigger temper, of course Patrick must be the prissy button-down guy surgically attached to his cellphone and legal briefs.

Most depressing of all, the female characters come across as largely devoid of agency and true self-reflection. At least Mick's sins can be understood through the lens provided by Ellison, but the women, despite Chavara's spunky efforts, remain frustratingly undefined except as collateral victims of Mick's domestic vigilantism.